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| Shadow of Mordor is swording for Batmans cowl by Gutsby 09/30/2014, 5:59pm PDT | ||||
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| Alright - I've only been playing for a couple of hours, but it has already shown me it wants to do a lot of things I want from character-focused open-world games.
The main thing they get right (so far) is making the open world a hostile world. If you're not going to make traversal a big deal, make the world dangerous. The obvious use of a massive world is travelling through it, and if you can't make that part fun, why bother architecting it in the first place? These guys built a multi-layered killbox set up to make you struggle to win unlikely fights instead. The game gets this right off the bat. You start out as an angry vengeful ghost (I genuinely know nothing about Lord Of The Rings), they killed your wife and son, you drop into the world, get mobbed as you try to waste an orc, and die. The orc gets stronger. You adjust your approach to set up traps and pick off guards. Then you brawl the badguy and his bodyguards to death in a cinematic punching game that is better looking than Batman. Assassins Creed is an awful game. Assassins Creed is an awful game. They also introduce some sort of consequence to an open world. This is insanely rare, and has usually taken the form of a harmless leakage of upgrade points, the checkpoint restart variety, or Dark Souls, which is really just a more severe variant of the first. In this game, every fight you lose to an Orc Boss results in this Orc being promoted up the Orc Flowchart. This system seems genuinely complex - I expected it to be a gimmick. If you go at an ork boss with a particular setup of gear and a lose or run away, it is likely he'll have developed resistances to this approach the next time you meet him. So you have to change your approach, figure out his new or persistent weaknesses by mind-fucking his lieutenants, and so on. I've been told the violence is out of place in this universe. I don't know anything about Lord of The Rings, so this is more of a dark fantasy game about a human guerilla fighter annihilating a hierarchy of sniveling beast-men from the bottom up. I really like this game. It seems like Metal Gear Solid V in a medieval setting; your approach to murdering people imprints on the world and haunts you, like a ghost. You also play some sort of medieval ghost, so it's very conceptually pure. That's my review. |
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